A tangled web

Recognising your attachment style as secure, anxious or avoidant can help you to be more conscious in your relationships, but nothing is set in stone. Seeing the way you relate to others as fluid and ever-changing can be liberating

Life rarely fits neatly into boxes, and no label can hold a whole person. This is particularly true of attachment theory, which explains that you are born with a need to form close bonds with your caregivers, and that these bonds set a foundation for future relationships. While the theory offers valuable insight into the way people bond and relate, there’s a risk in experiencing the concept as fixed. With a plethora of online quizzes on offer these days ready to tell you which attachment type you are, the results can sometimes feel reductive, leaving you feeling unseen or confused about what to do next. The truth is attachment is fluid. It shifts according to context, history and the people you’re with. Seen through the lens of Gestalt psychology (a school of thought that looks at behaviour as a whole), attachment theory is considered flexible, like a living matrix that constantly reshapes itself within the wider field of relationships and environments.

Attachment styles

Attachment theory began with the work of British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who suggested that early bonds with caregivers form an ‘internal working model’ of how safe, loved and supported people feel in relationships. American-Canadian developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth expanded on Bowlby’s work, developing the Strange Situation experiment to observe how infants responded to separation and reunion with a parent. From this, she identified three broad patterns: secure (comfortable with intimacy and independence), anxious-ambivalent (fearful of abandonment) and avoidant (values independence, uncomfortable with intimacy) attachment. A fourth, disorganised (a mix of avoidant and anxious-ambivalent) attachment, was added later. These provided a language for understanding why some people find it easy to trust, while others pull away from or hang on tightly to their relationships.